At the Bottom of Everything(31)

“Your bed’s that one. Sheets are in that stack.”

The word bed was like a glimpse of water in the desert, but before I could sleep Rory took me up onto the roof. One of the girls who was over had lived there when Thomas had, Rory said. The night sky was like a sagging yellow tent ceiling. From the street I could hear firecrackers and frantic technoish music. The forecast on the plane had said “Smoky heat,” which I’d assumed was a mistranslation, but the air actually was both smoky and hot; since the second we’d landed I’d been smelling burning tires, which probably explained my stinging eyes and running nose. In the half-dark of the rooftop I got an impression of a scene like a concert lawn: candles and devil sticks and skunky pot.

I think travel must have made more sense, psychologically, in the era of ocean voyages; in the three months it took to get from America to India you would’ve realized the extremity of what you were doing; you would have stepped off the boat knowing exactly how far you were from your old life. But I, sitting in a plastic lawn chair on that rooftop, gazing out through the smog at what seemed to be the dome of a mosque, still had a receipt from the Bethesda Row CVS in the front pocket of my jeans.

A group of people was sitting around a beach towel, playing a game that involved pressing a card against your forehead. There was a brutish barefoot guy with a shaved head. A forest-sprite girl leaning against the brute’s knee. A dreadlocked smirking guy who kept doing something double-jointed with his wrists.

“—I think I’ve got to fold again, fuck.”

“—maybe that’s exactly why she can’t, you know?”

“—I guess I just can’t see how that’s not just another kind of decision …”

“Hey, so you’re Thomas’s friend?”

It took me a couple of seconds to register that someone was talking to me. It was an Earth Mother–ish girl with a nose stud and a yellow bandanna, pulling a Kingfisher from the water in the cooler I hadn’t noticed I was sitting next to. “You went to high school with him, right?” Her name was Cecilia, and she was from a town in Minnesota where people just didn’t, she was eager to have me understand, go to India. She made me remember for the first time in years a hippie camp counselor I’d once had, the first woman I’d ever seen with armpit hair, belter of Sly and the Family Stone in the camp van. Cecilia had moved to Delhi a couple of years ago to study “bodywork,” and now she was taking, or maybe teaching, a course in conflict resolution.

“I’ve been worried about Thomas. Have you talked to him since his solo?”

“Hmm?”

“He was supposed to be back for a session with Guruji almost a month ago. Somebody said they saw him a couple of weeks ago at the cremation grounds.” While she talked she kept adjusting her neck, like a pigeon.

“And where was he supposed to be?”

“He was on his precept retreats. He was just about to do the cave.”

The forest sprite came bubbling up, dragging the brute along behind her (“What’s up?! Did you just get here?”), and Cecilia melted off toward the card game. The sprite, Nicola, looked vaguely South American and had eyes that made her seem permanently surprised. Another obvious thought I kept finding myself having: There are so, so many people in the world.

I stayed up on the roof for another half hour or so, drifting in and out of conversations, being introduced and introduced again, telling people how I knew Thomas, saying yes I’d be sure to do that, no I’d make sure to avoid doing the other, hearing the word guruji, sometimes the name Sri Prabhakara, like a recurrent scrap of melody.

“So he’s a meditation teacher?”

“Mmm … I would say more a philosopher.” (This was Nicola’s brutish boyfriend, Rik, who turned out to be somber and Danish, and to have spent the past couple of years playing semiprofessional basketball in Japan.)

“And is he old?”

“Seventy-five? Eighty? It’s not obvious to look at him.”

There was a nervous excitement that fluttered around any mention of Guruji, as if he were a movie star someone heard might be eating in the back room. Everybody who’d ever lived in the apartment knew him, apparently; it was a kind of study-house. I found myself picturing an old man with clouded-over eyes, a long beard, fingernails grown into rams’ horns; a cross between Ben Gunn and Gandhi.

“I didn’t actually see it,” the dreadlocked kid said to me, tilting his head back to finish a beer, “but somebody rode past your friend meditating by the train tracks like way the hell out. I think maybe he’s like a … dharma ghost.” This could be one of the frat houses at Penn, I kept thinking. But instead of talking about who was bringing Jägermeister and who was having sex, they were talking about compassion retreats and private sessions with Guruji. I was standing by the railing listening to an intense Israeli man named Jonah tell me about hijras, a caste of Indian transvestites who apparently have the power to curse people, when I realized I was sleeping with my eyes open.